I am working on a KiCad project with a friend and we post everything onto GitHub for easy sharing but whenever I receive his work, all the footprints and 3D models go away since they are assigned to his PC. How can I make it to that it just stays in the repo? All the assets are in the Repo folder
I am not a veteran with this software yet, but my suspicion is that it’s related to the libraries. Have you included all the libraries in the repo as well?
Yes, but I think it’s not working because it has the user in the path in the profile file
bumping this thread to get help
You need to use project-local libraries and relative paths for the 3D models if you want to store 3D models in the repository. Is your repo public? If not, can you share screenshots of the project library config, and an example footprint properties showing the 3D model config?
The repo is public. I can start looking into using project local libraries
Can you link to it? If so, it will be easier for people to give advice to fix the issue.
Here is a post were on where I landed setting up shared libraries whit Git. We have been using Kicad with Git since ~2015. Projects and Libraries are separate repos.
There are generally two ways to share designs with 3D models between computers:
-
Each computer must have the same global library config, so each KiCad installation must be able to find the same libraries and 3D models
-
The libraries and 3D models need to be stored inside the project and use relative paths
Your project does not do (2), so in order to see the libraries/3D models on different computers, you either need to move to option (2), or else install the libraries and configure them the same way on both computers.
For example, if you look at the keyswitch footprint:
You can see the footprint is referencing a 3D model that is supposed to be installed in $KICAD6_3DMODEL_DIR}, but this is not installed on my computer, so the model does not show up.
In order to share a design with this model, I need to either know where to get this library (Button_Switch_Keyboard.3dshapes) or the model needs to be referenced by a relative path to the project.
The post aaron linked to has some more details about one possible way to set this up, but there are other possible ways.
1 Like
Just to add to what Jon said, there is an “Archive” plug-in by @MitjaN , what it does is to collect the footprints and models from your project and copy them in a local folder (as the option 2 outlined above), it changes the references in the project also, with that the Project becomes “portable”
It would be helpful to support relative path names in the “Configure Paths” menu. It would be nice to set KICAD6_FOOTPRINT_DIR = ../libs/symbols
Then when you check out the repo, the libraries would be ready to use.
What do you guys think?
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.